The present disclosure relates to networking and more particularly to techniques for communicating messages between processing entities on a network device.
A networking device may have multiple processing entities within the device. Traditionally, the processing entities communicate with each other using the messaging schemes supported by the well-known networking layer protocols. One such well-known networking layer protocol from the Open System Interconnection (OSI) networking stack is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP facilitates delivery of packets from the source to the destination solely based on IP addresses. For this purpose, IP defines datagram structures that encapsulate the data to be delivered.
IP based addressing of the processing entities requires associating each processing entity with an IP address. IP addressing requires that the specific address of the intended recipient has to be known but there are situations where either this address is not known or determining the address requires extensive processing that adversely impacts the processing of the system/device. Therefore, IP based communication between the various processing entities does not allow flexibility in addressing of the processing entities.